Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Did Jeers ever qualify?”

“Jeers?”

“Guy said he was checked out in jackhammer but didn’t have the certification to prove it.”

“Yeah,” McBride said, stroking his jaw, remembering, “yeah, Jeers. No,” he said, “we gave him a test. He flunked. We let him wash dishes and work the grease trap till he earned the fare back to Alabama.”

I’m next, I thought, thinking of the half-million-bucks’ worth of Pentateuch back in my room under canvas and hasp. I’m next, I thought, thinking of that small biblical fortune in sterling silver yads and eighty-seven-thousand-karat beaten-gold menorahs and the shittim-wood arks.

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes. Well, no. I mean, well, what am I supposed to, you know, do ?”

“You’re the rabbi. You’re on call. You sit in the rabbi trailer and chat up the Jews.”

Sure enough. There it was. Right on the map. With my other useful addresses. However could I have missed it? If it’d been a snake it would’ve bit me. The rabbi trailer. To which, once I’d settled in, I repaired.

I posted regular office hours and, at least for the better part of the first two or three weeks, scrupulously observed them, almost as if they — the hours — were themselves a claim of conscience and comprised a set of canonical hours I solitarily kept, a squeezed matins and lauds, a concentrated prime and terce and sext and nones, the vespers and compline of contractual duty. (More often than not reminded of the flower-faced man, whom Philip had flown off with the next day, depositing him, so I was told, in Fairbanks, from which town he meant to make his way to Anchorage, perhaps by glacier, moving at the glacier’s pace, a few fast inches a day with the wind in his face.) No one came.

I had the use of Alyeska’s secretarial services and duplicating machines, and had notices posted on the bulletin boards announcing my presence at Prospect Creek camp. No one came.

And, after first reserving them with the authorities to be sure the Atco units that served as the club for Prospect Creek camp would be available when I needed them, I put other notices up — for dances, for get-togethers, inventing affairs, making the coffee-and-Danish arrangements, inviting our singles to come together in Jewish sock hop — high times for one and all. Again, of course, nobody came.

If, I figured, the mountain won’t come to Mohammed … And visited the sick in the infirmary. All I accomplished was to make those who were well enough nervous, and those who weren’t, terrified.

And it wasn’t as if there were no Jews at Prospect Creek. There weren’t a lot, but there were some, Jews of a different color, as the Catholics and Prots and even the Eskimos and Indians there were of a different color, order. Pipeline, they were pipeline Jews, there to make a wonder of the world. No back seat to God, they seemed to say. Oil or nothing! Valdez or bust! And proceeded to live some specially dispensated, tall-story life of the body and mind, their attention focused somewhere around the speed of sound, the speed of light, richocheted, caromed off the forces and their unleashed, hopped-up pagan energies.

I’m telling you, pally, like goyim they were.

So here’s what happened.

Piecemeal, I stopped being so scrupulous about office hours and came later and later to open up and sit inside my rabbi trailer. And closed shop earlier and earlier, too. Some days neglecting to drop by even to check the mail (letters from Shelley were delivered to my quarters), Alyeska’s endless series of internal memos, bulletins, clippings, pledge cards (for blood drives, for the Prospect Creek branch of the United Way), newsletters, notices, press releases, announcements (“Commencing the first of the month the laundry’s new hours will be from …”) — all that purple correspondence, as I came to think of the company’s impersonal, one-size-fits-all mimeography. And stayed indoors (as I came to think of the Atco unit where I lived), watching, in those old, pre-dish days, two- and three-day delayed editions of the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett.

In all fairness, what else could be expected of me?

In all fairness, nothing at all, but I knew that what I’d undertaken, to serve a sort of sabbatical year (to pick up extra bucks, to shop around for a congregation, to see how, or if, Alaska would suit, and send for Shelley and the tyke if I discovered it did), was become, for me, a time of trial. Prospect Creek, rather than the week or so I’d lived with Philip and Poseypuss in the crashed airplane, was quickly becoming my time in the wilderness. In Lud the dead were my congregation. I cheered for them and rooted them on the way St. Francis was said to do for the birds and the animals. Here, on the pipeline, I had no one at all.

You want to know something? You want to know what the Rabbi of Lud started to do with his hands now that he had so much time on them? That’s right. A grown man. A rabbi. Playing with himself like a bar mitzvah boy. True to Shelley at first, but getting out on the town more, at least in my head, gawking the cleavages and pupiks, underthighs, calves and asses on Carson’s, Griffin’s and Cavett’s guests on three-day delay, old Goldkorn placing shlong to palm for a little shvontz tug and putz pull.

It was an effort even to go to meals.

So I pulled myself together.

I went to meals. I went to meals and spoke when I was spoken to. I went to meals, spoke when I was spoken to, and passed the salt. I went to meals, spoke when I was spoken to, passed the salt and offered the bread basket. Piecemeal, I’m saying, in fits and starts, I fell in with them.

You have no idea what money was like in those days, what it meant, I mean. How easy it was to come by, how difficult it was to save. Generosity became a way of life. A way of life? A competition, an Olympic event. (Don’t think I wasn’t put in mind of the man with the flowers in his beard, of the tale he told us of John Lookout’s spectacular potlatch, of the competition among his guests to outshine, outspend and just generally outright outdo Lookout’s incredible example.)

One of the reasons, I think, the pipeline took so long to complete as it did, is that we fell victim to each other’s parties. We were beneficiaries and legatees, and went surety for one another’s benders and hangovers and lost weekends. We strung each other out, I mean, and put each other on the nod on the arm. Wasting and blazing our brothers and sisters. (We? Absolutely we.) There was a custom in those high-kicking, freewheeling, last-of-the-go-to-hell-goddammit days, for someone to come into a saloon and “six-pack the house,” by which was meant that one withdrew three hundred dollars or so from his billfold, laid it down on the bar (not slapped, laid, set down, though it must have started with slapped, started, that is, with noise and showbiz and only gradually, or maybe not so gradually, slipped into a quieter though even more ostentatious — reminded this time that there’s nothing new under the sun, reminded, I mean, of the flashy discretion and noisy circumspection of my bar mitzvah days, when people slipped money into my hand and into open places in my clothing — mode), and purchased half a dozen beers for everyone in the tavern. (It may have been a sign of the season’s excessiveness when the three hundred dollars became four and five hundred dollars, or even more, because the sports were offering not just six beers this time, but six actual mixed drinks. And it was certainly a sign when the four or five hundred dollars was no longer even laid on the bar, when the six-packer was entirely unknown to his devisees and annuitants, and all you needed to know that a treat was in store, was the sound of a phone ringing behind the bar, the sight of the saloon man answering it, the look on his face as he agreed and nodded into the telephone. And surely the final sign was that not one dollar, not one, was ever lost by a barkeep for his willingness not only to extend credit over the phone, but to extend it to someone who because there wouldn’t be any credit in it for him — in the generosity sweepstakes, in those great give-and-let-give games — if his name ever got out, not only refused to give it but often wasn’t even asked!) It was like when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and found the Jews trying it on with the Golden Calf!